Nearly half the population find the onset of winter gets them down, says a survey. With this year's shortest day on Sunday, more than 1,000 members of the public were quizzed about how they felt about the cold, dark days. The results show that 45% of them said they "felt like hibernating". A third said winter weather made them feel more depressed or anxious. And it was the youngest people questioned who appeared to be suffering the most. A quarter of young people aged 16 to 24 said they drank more during winter - although as this encompasses the Christmas and New Year party season, this is not the most surprising finding. However, more than half of the young people said they ate more during the winter. (C) BBC

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 3219 - Posted: 12.22.2002

NewScientist.com news service Are you dreaming of a happy Christmas? Feeling that Yuletide glow of goodwill? Or is Christmas that perennial day-from-hell when it is always you that ends up having everyone round for lunch, you that has to patch up family feuds, and you that has to keep a dozen children amused when you would rather be snoozing upstairs. New Scientist reclined on the couch and asked Graham Lucas, an occupational psychiatrist at the Priory Hospital in Surrey, UK, and a specialist in the study of holiday stress, about how to beat the holiday blues. "Christmas magnifies interpersonal tension," says Lucas. The stress often arises when different personality types, such as the laid-back type and the anxious type, are forced to cooperate and get along in close quarters. So the rule for a stress-free Christmas is know thyself - and be prepared to compromise. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 3218 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GINA KOLATA Dr. Ron Livesey was fat, tired and out of shape. At 49, he felt that his best years were behind him. So one day seven years ago, on his way to a medical meeting, he stopped at a doctor's office in Palm Springs, Calif., for his first hormone injections. Early the next morning, Dr. Livesey was at the meeting, sitting in a darkened auditorium watching slides of technical data. To his surprise, he found himself alert, taking everything in. He continued the hormone treatments. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 3217 - Posted: 12.22.2002

Ben Daitz New York Times ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - We sit around a large table in the conference room of the First Choice Community Health Center here. A purple paisley sheet, hung with duct tape, covers the window fronting the parking lot. In a corner of the room is a wheeled cart stacked with hospital gowns, gauze pads, syringes and a hydroculator unit, a metal tank containing hot packs in a water bath. There are nine of us, including Magda P., who sits at the head of the table, and all of us are munching grapes and Hershey Kisses from the communal snacks on the table. It is the Thursday afternoon chronic pain clinic and Magda is telling us her story. Magda is in her early 50s, a slim woman whose blonde hair is lightly touched with gray and tied back in a ponytail. She is a desk clerk in a motel. She used to be a successful trial lawyer who practiced martial arts in her spare time - until she was kicked in the head, a misplaced tae kwon do blow that momentarily knocked her unconscious. Copyright 2002, azcentral.com.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 3216 - Posted: 12.22.2002

BY MICHAEL A.W. OTTEY mottey@herald.com When clouds form and rain comes, and lightning strikes, and thunder roars, fear grows in the heart of Carlos Torres Jr. The Miami-Dade police officer, a resident of Pembroke Pines, was struck by lightning while he worked in his nursery in Southwest Ranches in July. It left him blind. On Friday, Torres announced that after months of blindness he had regained his sight. He credited his recovery to hours spent in an oxygen chamber at the Ocean Hyperbaric Neurologic Center in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. Copyright 2003 Knight Ridder

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 3215 - Posted: 12.22.2002

Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz. The names of well-known serial killers elicit chills and horror. What were they thinking? What could have been going on in their heads? Are their brains wired differently? Adrian Raine, professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, has been trying to find answers to these questions by watching killers’ brains at work. To do this he is using two scanning techniques: positron emission tomography (PET), which allows him to see how their brains function; and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) which helps him study the structure of their brains. Raine compared the function and structure of the brains of 41 murderers and 41 control subjects and found that there was lower activity in the pre-frontal cortex (an area located above the eyes and behind the forehead) of the brains of murderers when compared to that of normal control subjects. Raine explains that the prefrontal cortex acts as the “brakes” in our brains, and since these individuals have poor prefrontal functioning, they are unable to control and regulate their emotions. However, Raine says that although there are many associations between poor prefrontal function and violence, brain dysfunction cannot be the only reason for violent behavior. There are larger societal and environmental reasons that lead to an individual becoming a murderer. © ScienCentral, 2000-2002.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 3214 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An irresistible urge to move about, particularly while trying to sleep, seems like a made-up ailment. The condition, however, clinically termed restless legs syndrome, is now known to be a true disorder of the nervous system. New research maps its biological origin and may lead to improved treatments that can curb the disruptive symptoms in a wide range of patients. Ants under the skin. Heebie jeebies. Caffeine in the veins. Observations from a preschool class? Actually it's a list of complaints that people use to describe a prickly, creepy-crawly sensation in the legs and an irresistible urge to jerk about, particularly while trying to sleep. Once, these feelings were dismissed as a bizarre curiosity. "Heebie jeebies, you say?" But now mounting evidence shows that the plight, termed restless legs syndrome (RLS), is a true disorder that erupts from disturbances in the nervous system. Copyright © 2002 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 3213 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Remedies containing the herb Kava-kava have been banned after it was linked to four deaths. The herb is used as a natural tranquiliser and as an alternative to Valium. It was voluntarily removed from the shelves a year ago after almost 70 cases of suspected liver damage associated with the herbal medicine were reported, four in the UK. Seven patients needed liver transplants. The UK's Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM) and the Medicines Commission have now recommended a ban. The Medicines Control Agency, (MCA) which monitors the safety of all herbal medicines, including unlicensed ones, is now acting on that advice. An order prohibiting the sale of Kava-kava will come into force on 13 January next year. (C) BBC

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 3212 - Posted: 12.21.2002

Bruce Bower In 1958, farm workers digging in a cave in southern China's Liujiang County discovered several human bones including a skull. Relying on its resemblance to securely dated human fossils in Japan, scientists assigned this Homo sapiens skull an age of 20,000 to 30,000 years. However, the Liujiang finds may be much older than that, according to a report in the December Journal of Human Evolution. The fossils probably came from sediment dating to 111,000 to 139,000 years ago, says a team led by geologist Guanjun Shen of Nanjing (China) Normal University. He and his coworkers add that it's still possible that the Liujiang discoveries came either from a cave deposit dating from around 68,000 years ago or from one dating to more than 153,000 years ago. From Science News, Vol. 162, No. 25, Dec. 21, 2002, p. 387. Copyright ©2002 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 3211 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Do We Dream in Black and White or Technicolor? Riverside, Calif. – In the 1950's, dream researchers commonly thought that people dreamt in black-and-white, although both earlier and later treatments of dreaming assert that dreams have color. UC Riverside philosophy professor Eric Schwitzgebel contends that we know less than we think about the workings of our own mind. He said people reporting black and white dreams in the middle of the 20th Century may have been overly influenced by the black and white media images of the day in television and film. “If our opinions about basic features of our dreams can change with changes in technology, it seems to follow that our knowledge of our own dreams is much less secure than we might at first have thought it to be,” he said. Copyright 2002, Regents UC.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 3210 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PORTLAND, Oregon, -- Reporting in the January issue of the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center researchers and colleagues have found that combining the anticonvulsant drug divalproex with either olanzapine or risperidone-two commonly used antipsychotic drugs-significantly enhanced and hastened responses in patients suffering from acute psychotic episodes of schizophrenia. "Our findings suggest that combination therapy with divalproex can decrease the mental pain and suffering for many patients with schizophrenia and shorten the time they need to be in the hospital," said study leader Daniel E. Casey, M.D., Associate Director of Research for the VA Northwest Network's Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center, Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Portland VAMC and Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at Oregon Health & Science University. Compared to patients treated with either antipsychotic drug alone, the researchers found, those treated with the combination showed an enhanced reduction of symptoms as early as the third day of therapy. Further, the combination therapy was as well tolerated as either antipsychotic drug used alone, with no additional side effects.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 3209 - Posted: 12.21.2002

Therapy Helps Some Patients Reduce or Eliminate Medication By Sid Kirchheimer WebMD Medical News Reviewed By Brunilda Nazario, MD -- Biofeedback, a therapy in which patients are taught to control physiologic functions such as heart rate, muscle tension, and even their brain waves, is emerging as an effective treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). And new research suggests that it may be especially beneficial to patients who can't tolerate or don't benefit from often-used stimulant medications. Although prescribing drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall are the most common way of managing ADHD -- and bring improvement in about 80% of patients, says the American Psychiatric Association - they are not without problems. Many children taking them suffer side effects such as sleep problems, weight loss, jitters, and stomach upset, and nearly half of those with some types of ADHD don't respond to the drugs at all. Some experts are also concerned with their long-term use. But a new study, published in the December issue of Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback , indicates that ADHD kids who had weekly sessions of biofeedback therapy for a year were able to reduce or eliminate their medication - and maintained the same level of improvement in focus and concentration as when they had been on drug therapy. ©1996-2002 WebMD Inc.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 3208 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Penalty shoot-outs can have far more serious consequences than elimination from a football tournament, a study suggests. Researchers found that the number of heart attacks increased by 25% when England lost to Argentina in a penalty competition at the 1998 World Cup. The findings provide firm evidence to back up the theory that heart attacks can be triggered by emotional upset. The researchers examined hospital admissions for heart attack, stroke, deliberate self harm, and road traffic injuries on the day of, and five days after, England's World Cup matches. They compared them with admissions at the same time in previous and following years and in the month before the tournament. The risk of admission for heart attack increased by 25% on 30 June 1998 - the day of the England-Argentina match - and on the following two days. (C) BBC

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 3207 - Posted: 12.20.2002

NewScientist.com news service A comprehensive analysis of Playboy magazine centrefolds over the past 50 years shows the models have become more androgynous. This finding challenges the idea that the type of female figure that men find most attractive remains the same over time, say Martin Voracek at the University of Vienna and Maryanne Fisher at York University in Canada. The pair scrutinised 577 consecutive monthly issues of Playboy, from the first ever edition in December 1953 to December 2001. Data on height, weight and measurements for the bust, waist and hip accompanied the photographs. From these data they calculated body mass index, waist to hip ratio and a rating on an androgyny index. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 3206 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Eric Haseltine The page you are reading now looks flat and feels flat, but your brain isn't so certain. That's because when the human brain evolved into its current form about 30,000 years ago, it was programmed for interpreting 3-D objects, especially predators, not images on flat surfaces. As a result, your brain plays tricks on you. For example, the dimensions of the two tabletops above look different, but they are actually identical. The front edge of the table on the left is the same length as the left edge of the table on the right, but it looks shorter because perspective makes it appear closer and therefore smaller. Similarly, the front and rear edges of the right-hand table are actually longer than the apparently receding long edges of the left-hand table. Although many optical illusions depend upon erroneous transformations of two dimensions into three, your brain's tendency to project depth onto flat surfaces can occasionally help it correctly interpret what it sees.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 3205 - Posted: 12.20.2002

By ERICA GOODE Clozapine, one of a new generation of anti-psychotic drugs, has become the first psychiatric medication to win federal approval as a treatment for suicidal behavior. The Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday that the agency had approved the drug for treating recurrent suicidal thoughts or suicide attempts in patients with schizophrenia, a devastating illness that afflicts 1 of 100 Americans. Clozapine was first marketed in 1989 by Novartis under the brand name Clozaril. But the company's exclusive rights to sell the drug expired in 1994, and the medication is also available in generic form. Copyright The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 3204 - Posted: 12.20.2002

Dian Land The slightest turn of the head can significantly change the way a person or animal detects sound. A subtle tilt alters the angle at which high-frequency sound waves hit the ear, providing cues to localize the sound. To use those cues, the brain must put what it hears into the context of the position of the head. Until recently, scientists were not sure how this was done. Now researchers at UW Medical School appear to have the explanation. They have discovered that in the cochlear nucleus, the first sound-processing station in the brain, certain cells accomplish the job by integrating the two kinds of information, each of which travels along a distinct pathway. The researchers compared activity in both pathways, examining currents running through synapses--or signal-transmitting junctions--in fusiform cells of the cochlear nucleus. To their surprise, they learned that synapses transmitting acoustic information were not influenced by previous activity--they were stable. On the other hand, synapses carrying information about head and ear position were continually strengthened or weakened depending on the amount of activity-they were plastic. Copyright © 2002 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 3203 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Research continues in an effort to determine if these neural cells can be transplanted to treat stroke, brain tumors and neurodegenerative disorders LOS ANGELES – Researchers at Cedars-Sinai's Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute have for the first time demonstrated that stem cells from whole adult bone marrow can be differentiated into several types of cells of the central nervous system. A long-term objective of this research is to determine if these neural stem cells can be transplanted to treat stroke, brain tumors and neurodegenerative disorders. This capability would give physicians a renewable source of neural progenitor cells, available from a patient's bone marrow instead of the brain, and without the ethical and tissue-rejection issues associated with the use of fetal stem cells. Results of the study appear as the cover article of the December issue of the journal Experimental Neurology. While this study was conducted in rats, similar optimistic results have been seen in human tissue, according to senior author John S. Yu, M.D., Co-director of the Comprehensive Brain Tumor Program at the Neurosurgical Institute.

Keyword: Stem Cells
Link ID: 3202 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Much of the construction of an image takes place in the retina itself through the use of specialized neural circuits The retina, the filmy piece of tissue lining the back of the eyeball, is considered the best understood part of the brain. Intricate exchanges among the neurons of the retina allow much image construction to take place in the eye itself. Visual perception begins within cells called photoreceptors, where proteins embedded in cell membranes change shape when exposed to light. Layers of other retinal cells transfer signals from the photoreceptors to the optic nerve. The intervening layers process the signals--among other tasks, adjusting neural responses under different lighting conditions and increasingly distinguishing objects from their backgrounds. Vision researchers estimate that careful study of the anatomy and physiology of the vertebrate retina has clarified about half of all the interactions in this tissue. Helga Kolb is professor emeritus of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Utah. She studied at the University of Bristol, completing her Ph.D. in 1971. She conducted eye research at the Institute of Ophthalmology in London, where she became involved in studies of electrophysiology and anatomy, and later moved to positions at Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health. She joined the Utah faculty in 1979. © American Scientist 2003

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 3201 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Connor, Science Editor New technology has allowed scientists to witness for the first time how experiences and memories are laid down in the brain as electrical circuits made from nerve tissue. The findings shed light on learning and memory, and could lead to alternative ways of dealing with brain damage and mental retardation, the scientists said. Two teams of researchers have independently observed microscopic "spines" growing and retracting from the ends of nerve cells in the brains of adult mice over a period of several days. They believe the spines move in response to memories and experiences the mice come across as they explore a new environment. © 2002 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 3200 - Posted: 06.24.2010